One year after its victory in the air campaign over Kosovo, the U.S. Air Force
is trying to come to grips with what that victory means for the future of "air
power."
Even the word "victory" is being thrown into question.
Some service officials also are taking advantage of hindsight in judging to
what extent that operation, called Allied Force, fairly could be labeled a "coalition"
effort.
Others are reassessing their weapon-technology wish lists in order to reflect
priorities that have moved up in the rankings after the Kosovo operation.
The commander of that air war, Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, recently offered some
sobering thoughts aimed at those who believe the Air Force ought just to revel
in its accomplishments. For one thing, said Short, the violence and instability
that today rule in parts of Kosovo prompt the question of whether the U.S.-led
campaign really achieved a victory in the conventional sense. Short, who is soon to retire as commander of Allied Air Forces Southern Europe,
made these remarks to the Air Force's annual warfare symposium in Orlando, Fla.
"If you see what is happening in Mitrovica, you don't know who won in
Kosovo," said Short. He was referring to the unrest witnessed in that city
in recent months. It will be a long time, he said, before the United States
can claim without any doubt that operation Allied Force resulted in complete
victory. "We are not there yet," said Short. "We won't be there
for a long time."
The Air Force was directed to start bombing Serbia to "show NATO resolve,"
said Short, but the officers in charge never were told what "end state"
was desired for Kosovo. And, to this day, "we don't know," he said.
"I haven't yet seen it articulated."
The achievements of the operation notwithstanding, Short asserted, there is
some bad news for the Air Force. "Now, we are left with a generation of
politicians ... who have an unrealistic picture of air power. [They see it as]
a video game on CNN."
Short not only regrets that the Air Force made the operation look "too
easy," but he also wishes he had dealt with the coalition members differently.
"I failed to put together a senior leadership team that reflected a coalition,"
said Short. The top commanders, with operational responsibility, were all American.
"If I had to do it over again, I would have representation of the other
allies at the top level," he said. "We should never again run a U.S.-only
command structure inside the NATO alliance."
The United States, despite its military superiority, should have acted more
as a partner and less as the boss, Short said. "Their airplanes may not
be as capable. But have a plan for them. Make them feel good ... At the table,
treat everybody as equals. Listen to what they have to say. Our allies need
to understand what we intend to do."
Since the end of the air campaign, it has become a cliché at the Pentagon
to talk about the "lessons learned" from Kosovo. But Short does not
buy into the hype. "Kosovo is the past," he said. He believes it is
time to move on.
New Technology
Other Air Force officials, meanwhile, are determined to make the lessons from
Kosovo work to their advantage in the form of new air combat technology.
Gen. John P. Jumper, who heads the Air Combat Command in Langley, Va. is responsible
for training and maintaining combat-ready forces.
For Jumper, what the Air Force must learn from the Kosovo campaign is how to
train future leaders so that they "command and control aerospace power"
against the post-Cold War enemies.
Essentially, Jumper explained, Air Force colonels and generals need to be able
to manage air operations so they can react quickly to unexpected events and
perform more effectively against rapidly moving targets. The technology developed
for the Cold War does not allow them to do that.
Commanders trained to run air operations under the traditional rules are more
focused "on process than on the product," Jumper told the conference.
The product, in this case, is the number of targets destroyed.
"We confuse process with product," he said. "Wars are not won
by managing process."
After Allied Force, he added, two of the top priorities became the integration
of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and the ability
of ISR assets to communicate with command and control (C2) platforms. That makes
it possible, for example, to chase tanks on the move and to kill targets on
short notice because less time is wasted on intelligence collection.
"We want to be able to act in real time," said Gen. Michael E. Ryan,
the Air Force chief of staff. He explained that the sensor-to-shooter timeline
"has to do with our capability to net our aircraft ... Not just the attack
aircraft but also the ISR aircraft and the air operations center." In Allied
Force, said Ryan, the U.S. forces were able to respond to strike calls within
hours. "We want to go to minutes," he said.
It appears that the Air Force is moving closer to fielding a capability to
automate air operations and free up commanders to run the war, as opposed to
getting bogged down by cumbersome technology.
One of those "cantankerous pieces of technology" is the infamous
CTAPS, said Jumper. That stands for contingency theater autonomous planning
system. It is used to write air-tasking orders. "We spent more time trying
to make them work than those systems worked for us," he said.
Air commanders use CTAPS, along with a separate intelligence system and a wing
command and control system for scheduling aircraft.
Several Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps units expect to receive, in the near
future, a new joint combat-planning tool that integrates all three legacy technologies
into one. It is called the theater battle-management core systems (TBMCS). The
technology has been in development for five years and finally will be ready
for operational use sometime this summer, said Jack "Pat" Murphy,
systems engineer for TBMCS at Lockheed Martin Mission Systems.
This system, said Murphy, will provide the capabilities Air Force generals wished
they had had in Kosovo. It is one among many systems that the Air Force hopes
to buy this century in order to re-define the meaning of "air power."